The present invention relates in general to World Wide Web portals, and in particular to integration of personalized portals with Web content syndication.
Web content syndication is an increasingly popular way for content providers to draw attention (and visitors) to their World Wide Web (Web) pages or sites. Using generally available content syndication technologies such as RSS (Rich Site Summary, also sometimes called Really Simple Syndication and RDF [resource description framework] Site Summary), a content provider can easily create an XML summary of the site's content. The summary, which typically includes a number of “headlines” having various segments such as a title, a link to the content, and a brief description, is stored on the originating site's Web server as an RSS “feed.” The RSS feed can be created and updated manually (e.g., by editing the XML) or automatically (e.g., by using various scripts to periodically scan the site and update the XML). Operators of other sites, or individual users, can “subscribe” a page to the RSS feed by including a reference to the desired RSS feed in the HTML or other source code for the subscribed page. When the subscribed page is displayed, the RSS feed (which is maintained on the originating site's server) is accessed, and the title of each item in the summary is displayed on the subscribed page as a link. A viewer of the subscribing page can click on any of these links to view the item at the originating site.
In theory, a user could aggregate RSS feeds from all of the websites he or she regularly visits onto a single “master” page that the user controls. By reviewing the master page, the user would be able to see whether any new content has been added to any of the sites.
In practice, this is not so easy, in part because it is not always apparent whether an RSS feed is available from a particular page or site. For example, a user who executes a search using a Web search service may receive a large number of links to “hit” pages or sites. Without clicking through the links to visit the various pages or sites, the user cannot determine whether the site has an RSS feed. In addition, if the user discovers that there is an RSS feed and decides to subscribe, the user would have to separately access his or her master page in order to add the RSS feed.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide less cumbersome ways for users to add RSS feeds to a master page or other user-owned page.